


Year One

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-18
Updated: 2011-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-28 07:20:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6319906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ford's first year on Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Year One

The first thing he’d learned was that human beings were afraid of everything. And if they weren’t afraid of it, they were disgusted by it, wanted to kill it, or were just put off in general by it.

“You have four nipples? Ew.”

“Is that supposed to look like that?”

“I’m fairly certain freckles aren’t typically that shade of pinkish-orangey-violet.”

It was less than two days before Ford realised that if he wanted to survive on this ignorant planet that he’d have to wear ‘layers,’ as the colloquialism went. Of course, no one told him that typically these layers should not combine floral patterns, various sorts of tartan, and pinstripes, but it kept people from turning that particular shade of green that he was fairly certain human beings were not naturally meant to be, when they looked at him.

San Francisco was a lot of fun. Somehow, people seemed less inclined to make strange faces at what he had by then learned to pass off as a rare birth defect that, let’s face it, made sex all the more interesting, simply by adding to his number of erogenous zones.

Of course, it was in San Francisco that he learned that a binary vascular system was not something of which ape-descended life forms should be made aware. By his own calculation, he had escaped a hell of various needles and catheters that would span until the last syllable of recorded time by mere seconds.

Russia, he decided, could be summed up thusly: stupidly cold, stupidly big, and the location of some of the best alcohol on the planet. Two livers and an ability to metabolise vodka the way humans metabolise fizzy water won him more than a few Rubles from drinking games. Of course, being from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, he had failed to take into account the abysmal exchange rates, and found that he was still broke beyond all reason when he returned to England.

In Soho, he’d found a new way to make money. In 1964, when certain acts performed between consenting adults were still criminalised, every aspect of his plan had been terribly illegal, which made it terribly dangerous, which only made Ford want to do it even more. He had found that there were plenty of humans who enjoyed doing terribly illegal and terribly dangerous things so much, that they would be willing to pay for it. Some of them even seemed to like the peculiar aspects of Betelgeusian anatomy, and would even pay extra to do things to those particular aspects of Betelgeusian anatomy.

His first winter on Earth, he found his way to Cottington, a cruddy little village out in what was apparently called the West Country (which made no sense at all, as there was clearly more land and country even further west). It was there, after his fourth bottle of Talisker, that he happened to look up and notice a red, blinky star almost directly overhead of him. Of course. 620 light years away, it would st ill be visible from there. Human kind wouldn’t know about the fate of that particular star in the constellation Orion for over half a millennium.

It hit him like a tonne of Arcturan mega bricks. He was stranded – a fact he already knew – but he was at least stranded on a planet where his home was still, ironically, visible.

Yes, maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all. At least, that’s what he told the very friendly constable who found him asleep in a police box (which, rather annoyingly, had not been bigger on the inside, but instead, a bit smaller).


End file.
